Pragmatic properties of the ethical dative in Brazilian Portuguese: a minimalist analysis
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The aim of this paper is to analyze the pragmatic features of the ethical dative in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) from a minimalist perspective (Chomsky, 1995 and subsequent work). The ethical dative is necessarily a 1st person clitic, i.e. it is a participant in the discourse (speaker). This clitic is merged above the VP, that is, it occurs immediately before the verb and is interpreted as in some way “affected by” or “related to” the event described by the verb. The ethical dative in BP occurs preferentially in contexts of imperative or exclamative illocutionary force but can appear in declarative sentences. Looking at the pragmatic features of the ethical dative, I propose that it is syntactically and semantically licensed by an Applicative functional head, which conveys the semantic interpretation of “affectation” or “anchorage” through the Event Identification operation, as described by Pylkkänen (2002); and it is pragmatically licensed by a Participant functional head, which relates the clitic to its pragmatic interpretation through a presupposition operation. Thus, this paper shows that the interaction between syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features through the minimal operations MERGE and AGREE makes it possible to analyze the ethical dative from a minimalist perspective.
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